Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: philosophy

  • Plato – R.M. Hare

    Writing short introductions to classic philosophers are hard. This book tries, but falls a bit short as a true introduction.

    Plato – R.M. Hare (1983) – 117 pages

    Plato, the first documented, Western philosopher set the pace for 25 centuries of philosophy. This book explains the culture and setting where Plato developed his philosophy, and their interrelation. It also touches on the main aspects of his philosophy as well as you could possibly expect in a short book of around 100 pages. But I do have two issues with this book.

    Firstly, as a reader you need to bring your a-game. There are quite a few names and concepts thrown at you. I assume that people who pick up this book know very little about philosophy so this seems like a mismatch. Secondly; it does not help that most of the language is highly academic (note, I did read a Dutch translation). Two or three chapters were decisively easier to read than the rest of the book, because the language was completely different.

    So even if I picked up a few things I would not suggest this book as an introduction to Plato. (Reasons are similar to the Kierkegaard book.) In 2019, if you need an introduction I would suggest you read the Wikipedia page. It’s clearer in language and structure than this book from 1983. I expect somewhere there must be easier introductions to philosophy, geared towards true novices. If not, consider it an untapped market (or maybe we have it already and it’s called Wikipedia).

  • Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner

    Kierkegaard – Patrick Gardiner (1988) – 154 pages

    In general, philosophy has a reputation of being hard to understand, and Kierkegaard certainly does nothing to lessen this reputation. He was largely misunderstood in his lifetime, but also very aware that he was ahead of his time. Maybe that’s why he was an enormously prolific writer. His works are often complex and paradoxical in tone and plentiful enough to ponder on its meaning for many lifetimes.

    This book has the almost ungrateful job of trying to give an introduction to this rebel amongst philosophers. No easy task. And the writer does not help himself by choosing overly complex phrasings for already complex matters. So this is not an easy read. And, being an introduction, I expected a different writing style.

    But I did enjoy the biographical background information about Kierkegaards’ life in the first chapters. After that, Gardiner picks out 4 seminal works to explore main Kierkegaard themes. He does so by offsetting these to other philosophers, especially Kant en Hegel. But without necessary background this can quickly get complicated. (I had to keep notes.) Nevertheless, I especially enjoyed the Abraham paradox as a thinking exercise, and this book also provides nice starting points on Kierkegaards’ thoughts on subjectivity, immorality, individualism and the leap of faith concept.